Sunday, March 2, 2014

ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU PUKE.

I get angry at cheating and dishonesty. It has gotten to the point
where if I boycotted, by not buying from all the companies that engage
in dishonest behavior, I wouldn't be able to shop anywhere. I do not read a major city newspaper. I get news from two major newspapers on-line, where I usually pedal through the headlines and pick and choose what I read. How did I miss this in 2010? And, why does it take so long to do something about it?

Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals
denied attempts by Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe to have the lawsuit
tossed, and gave final approval for the class action suit to go forward.

The secret wage-theft agreements between Apple, Google,
Intel, Adobe, Intuit, and Pixar are described in court papers obtained
by PandoDaily as “an overarching conspiracy” in violation of the Sherman
Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, and at times it reads like
something lifted straight out of the robber baron era that produced
those laws. Today’s inequality crisis is America’s worst on record since
statistics were first recorded a hundred years ago — the only
comparison would be to the era of the railroad tycoons in the late 19th
century.

Bill Campbell, a member of Apple’s board of directors and senior
advisor to Google, emailed Jobs to confirm that Eric Schmidt “got
directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from
Apple.”Later that year, Schmidt instructed his Sr VP for Business Operation
Shona Brown to keep the pact a secret and only share information
“verbally, since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can
be sued later?”These secret conversations and agreements between some of
the biggest names in Silicon Valley were first exposed in a Department
of Justice antitrust investigation launched by the Obama Administration
in 2010.To the naysayers, it isn't excusable,
and it is theft of not only wages, but of career opportunity.Imagine you were a hot shot Apple employee. If this anti poaching agreement didn't exist, that Apple employee
could have (potentially) doubled her salary by becoming an executive at
Yahoo or Intel. Two companies which would have paid through the roof to
get some of that Apple pixie dust. But since they were afraid to incur
the wrath of Jobs, the workers lost out, and they had no idea that they
were secretly blacklisted.